Business and Investing

The ex-CEO of Ticketmaster explains how the music concert ticket market works: Famous Artists know that the pricing of tickets is normally below the market value. The Artists don’t want to the seen to be unfairly pricing tickets to their fans, so sell tickets into agents and other channels that resell them on the market. These agents then kick back the increased resale price to the Artists.

Great news for the cable industry and consumers with Coaxial cable into their house, Nokia is now getting 10 gbps of data each way. The old Coaxial networks continue to growth their bandwidth capability by increasing the technology at each end, and that trend looks set to continue.

The mobile phone industry has had two waves: voice and SMS, and then the smartphone. Since smartphones could be sold for higher average prices than feature phones, revenue grew even faster than unit sales. This was a great multiplier for the right companies – smartphones were a growing percentage of growing phone sales at growing prices. All of this is now reaching an end – the wave is almost over.

A Northwestern University study claims perovskite solar cells can recoup their energy (note: not financial) cost within three months, over 10 times faster than traditional silicon-based solar cells.

Economics and Politics

Howard Marks explains in economic terms why many of Trump’s policies designed to help voters will actually result in lower employment and reduced prosperity for the US. One example Marks shows is Trump’s proposed tariffs on Chinese imports, which Mark’s argues will simply make the cost of everyday goods more expensive and out of the reach of the lowest paid workers, the people Trump’s policy is designed to benefit. Marks uses the recent economic demise of Venezuela as a case study of populist economic policies having devastatingly opposite consequences to those intended.

“The white working class is correct to feel abandoned: it has been. No political party has anything to offer it except varying levels of benefits. The people in the rich parts of the country pay the taxes which support the poor parts. If I had to pick a single fact which has played no role in political discourse but which sums up the current position of the UK, it would be that most people in the UK receive more from the state, in direct cash transfers and in benefits such as health and education, than they contribute to it. The numbers are eerily similar to the referendum outcome: 48 per cent net contributors, 52 per cent net recipients. It’s a system bitterly resented both by the beneficiaries and by the suppliers of the largesse.”….

“A revealing, and sad, piece in the Economist in 2014 described Tilbury, forty minutes from London, where the white working class look on resentfully as immigrants get up early and get the train to jobs in the capital which, to them, seems impossibly distant. ‘Most residents of the town, one of England’s poorest places, are as likely to commute to the capital as fly to the moon.’”….

“The evidence on immigration is clear: EU immigrants are net contributors to the UK’s finances, and are less likely to claim benefits than the native British. The average immigrant is younger, better educated and healthier than the average British citizen. In other words, for every immigrant we let in, the country is richer, more able to pay for its health, education and welfare needs, and less dependent on benefits. They are exactly the demographic the UK needs. As for the much touted Australian ‘points system’, we have nothing to learn from it: immigrants to the UK are better educated and more skilled than immigrants to Australia. In addition, most of the people who appear as immigrants in the migration statistics are students, because the Home Office chooses to count students who come for the duration of degree courses as migrants. Of the 330,000 net arrivals in the latest numbers, 169,000 are students. Do you consider students to be migrants? Personally, I don’t”.

Inspiration

Get over being rejected, it even happened to JK Rowling. She kindly shared her rejections letters on Twitter.

Videos & TV

Gravity visualised. Now you can visually see why gravity bends and planets orbit. This clever Professor using marbles and a circular piece of latex to contructs a mock up solar system. As he throws the marbles into orbit they randomly hit each other and thus end up going the same direction, explaining why all orbits around the sun are in the same direction.

Every year Tony Robbins, one of the world’s leading self-help gurus, hosts packed seminars to help his delegates overcome their problems and find a way to move forward in the life they want. Normally conducted in private, Tony lets in the cameras for the first time and the result is a documentary well worth viewing. Both enlighting and emotional displaying this Netflix only product shows his extra ordinary skills at work.

Quotes That Made Me Smile

“We’re not anchoring what we are ignoring”, Charlie Munger on Anchoring Bias at this year’s Berkshire Hathaway AGM.

“What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.” — Joseph Tussman

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Tim O'Shea is an FCA approved person with Credo Capital Plc “Credo”. Credo is a London Stock Exchange member firm and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. The content on this website does not constitute investment advice, and represents the writer's personal opinions only.
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